Long call from a friend struggling in the black hole of depression. And right after I put the phone down I read Marian Keyes on getting sober and then getting through the nightmare of depression:
“As I get older the stars have gone from my eyes more, and I see that life is just something that has to be lived with, that it’s better not to struggle,” she says. “I have had to lower my expectations and embrace the shiteyness, to embrace the fact that as a human being I’m nearly always going to be in a state of incompleteness or yearning or pain of some sort, or fear, because that’s what human beings are … Joy is so fleeting – God, I sound such a misery guts – but for me it’s not about chasing happiness or chasing joy, but to say, when it does happen, ‘oh that’s lovely’. To appreciate it, rather than to expect it.”
More bright orange-red flowers opening on my pomegranate tree. The housemate phones to say rival groups of taxi drivers are shooting it out on the highway — today is a public holiday ironically known as the Day of reconciliation. The dogs nose suspiciously at ice cubes in their drinking water. Brilliant arc of bright blue sky overhead, the sun like a blazing magnet. Last night a dream about my lovely friend T who died at the end of September, the nudging of grief within. Thinking about that Mayan thing too, not seriously –
A Song On the End of the World
By Czeslaw Milosz
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.
